


Boiling A Frog

by apiphile



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Character Study, Other, aquarium, wtf?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-09
Updated: 2010-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-07 20:23:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Accidents, side-effects, and being more careful with language.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boiling A Frog

The bimonthly Torchwood poker game is less an exercise in team-building and more one in people-watching for Jack. When he first assembled his team at Three, Suzie won about 80% of the time, Tosh for the rest. Owen's wins were a negligible minority. These days Tosh wins most of them, with Owen finally beating out his teammates because Gwen couldn't bluff convincingly if she was being paid a billion to do it, and Ianto, but on purpose, and had been doing so ever since he first arrive. Ianto apparently preferred to sit out games where possible.

Even now he gets the impression sometimes that Ianto doesn't think of himself as part of the team but as something that is used by it, a service or tool rather than a person. Looking at Gwen (whose fondness for Ianto surprised him on his return but has since been dismissed as Gwennishness), at Tosh (who apparently communicates with Ianto in silence and coffee and who trusts him as completely as she trusts gravity), even at Owen (for whom Ianto is the only safe competitor he has, the only person whose expectation and evaluation of him is nor more or less than "Owen"), Jack knows it's not a view held by the rest of the team.

Jack kind of wonders if he's in part responsible for Ianto's continued detachment – if by singling him out for … if he's marking him as somehow apart.

Jack's reading over the most recent mission report when Ianto comes into his office on the usual mug-collecting spree. He already has a tray of more cups than people who actually work there, because Torchwood Three is populated by untidy geniuses who find the concept of cleaning away after themselves something of a trial.

Of course they do _logically_ know that the "coffee mug fairy" is Ianto (building on his success as the "wedding fairy", the "washing-up fairy", the "filing fairy" and the "Jack, I can't believe you just called me a" fairy) but it's not the first thing that springs to mind at 3am. Caffeine deprivation can do funny things to a man's mind.

Jack passes Ianto the three empty mugs congregating into a minor political settlement on his desk and asks, apropos of little, "Are you happy?"

Ianto pauses in mid-tidy, his hand on the last of the mugs. "Why?"

"That's not _really_ an answer," Jack folds his arms and leans back in his seat to give Ianto the Managerial Eye. He learnt it from off a week-long binge of _The Apprentice_ while Ianto was holidaying and he was very very bored, as Jack had never actually run anything approaching a company before and despite having been in charge of Torchwood for eight years now he still found that staff issues tripped him up a lot.

The only response to this finely-tuned body language is that Ianto stifles a hiccup and stoops briefly to clear an empty sugar packet into the bin.

"Think of this as a, uh, a staff evaluation meeting," Jack suggests, putting his feet on his own paperwork.

"The last time I had one of those you were naked and wielding a scimitar," Ianto points out, "And I need to help Owen label and bag a few chunks of revolting alien innards before lunch, so it can't take four hours this time." He sets the tray down just out of Jack's "flail circumference" nonetheless.

"That was a _date_," Jack frowns, trying to remember the circumstances. He remembers the scimitar, of course, and he won't forget the pineapple in a hurry, but he's pretty sure that one was a date.

"No, it was a _tryst_," Ianto corrects, standing almost to attention, "and it _started_ as a staff evaluation meeting. I know because I found the pineapple chunks in my box file – "

Jack can't help sniggering. "Sorry, sorry. You're right, it was. I just mean … as your captain it's my duty to make sure everyone's running on an even keel."

Ianto sticks his hands in his trouser pockets and Jack gets a sudden and unwelcome lump in his throat, imagining the suit to be brown. "An even keel," Ianto repeats, and the lump vanishes. "Gwen had a six-hour telephone argument last week because Rhys hadn't seen her at home for five days. Tosh has been talking to the coffee machine – "

"Oh, we all do _that_."

"- talking to, Jack, not swearing at."

"Oh."

"And Owen … where do you even start with Owen? Do I actually need to mention Owen?" Ianto rolls his eyes. He does this so expressively that Jack occasionally wishes he could bottle the skill and inject it. If this were the 51st Century he _could_. Stupid backwards 21st Century. "No one here _but_ me is runs on an even keel. Why the sudden interest?"

Jack grins across the desk. "Oh come _on_, you're not all _that_ well-balanced. That thing with the hockey-stick and the raccoon cap? I hate to break it to you but _normal_ guys don't encourage their boyfriend to do stuff like that."

There is a ghastly silence in which Jack immediately knows he's said something truly idiotic but can't yet work out which part of what he said is the offender. Ianto is giving him a frozen look and it's so quiet that Jack can hear Owen humming a Supergrass song in the autopsy room.

"Did I just – " he begins, and Ianto nods stiffly.

"Yes."

"I said – "

"You did."

"_Boyfriend_," Jack says apologetically. "Um. Shall we just pretend that never happened?"

"Yes," Ianto says, and he flees the room without picking up the tray.

* * *

 

Jack considers this exchange a lot over the next few days. This is in part because he's pretty sure he said nothing actually _wrong_, but mostly because thanks to a slight error in the rift-monitoring equipment and an ill-balanced glass of water, he's trapped in a time loop in a disused aquarium with no way of communication to his team outside the building.

So Jack wanders dark corridors, surrounded by the phantasms of long-dead eels, rays, sharks, and seahorses, and mulls shit over in his mind. It's not as though the conversation with Ianto is top priority for brain-time, exactly, just that Jack's got so many memories he'd rather not delve into that his psyche is starting to feel like a minefield, and it's safest to stick to recent events.

It was a poor choice of word. He and Ianto have talked – well, okay, they emphatically _haven't_, but Jack got the message all the same – about this before. The concept of "boyfriend" is verboten for a lot of half-voiced reasons: because Ianto's not doing all this so much out of romantic desire as out of the need to shut out parts of his mind (and Jack can really relate to that). Because the word "boyfriend" still implies fidelity and monogamy in the 21st Century and Jack's no more capable of either than he is of dragging-up convincingly; he can wear the clothes and walk the walk but no one's exactly sold on the idea – and perhaps Ianto doesn't want that weighing on him, that expectation that's inevitably going to be crushed. Because, maybe … Jack's not really sure.

He's been left alone with ghost jellyfish for three days and his brain's getting antsy from the lack of sentient interaction. It's times like this that he gets that old selfish desire to see that incongruous blue box nestling among the debris of some forgotten room. To round a corner and see a longed-for face, to hear the delighted note in an achingly familiar voice. To lose himself in the company of someone who is indisputably _better_ than him.

He walks through a cloud of temporally disengaged sardines and the radio in his ear beeps at last, _at last_.

"Jack?" Gwen asks. "Jack, we managed to reverse the – "

Jack knows when she says "we" she means "Tosh" but he lets it slide. "I can get out now?"

"Not … yet," says Ianto, his unmistakable voice preoccupied but still surprisingly comforting. "You're going to need to double back and find yourself as you entered."

"And what?"

This time it's Owen. "And warn yourself not to go any further in. Apparently that's the only way to get you _out_." He doesn't sound wholly convinced, but also like he's going to get the damn message across come hell, high water, or accidental explosions.

"I'll create a paradox," Jack snaps, "I told you, we don't take _any_ risks concerning paradox creation – it's _extremely_ dangerous – "

"You can always spend eternity in an abandoned aquarium," Ianto says, quite lightly given the potential circumstances.

A spectral lobster walks through Jack's leg. Every time the sealife passes through him he gets cold, gets a little bit of their simple memories in his own. The lobster seems to have lived quite a sad life, and Jack finds himself shivering a little as blood returns to where the wavering crustacean has passed.

"It'll collapse the loop," Tosh says. She sounds tired. "The paradox should make the time loop implode. It'll wash out – crzz – ffzk - _czzzzhhhhsss_ \- "

Jack frowns. Temporal activity isn't _meant_ to interfere so badly with their radios. He runs towards the place he first appeared in, keen to get the hell out, maybe have some coffee and a hot shower and complete the likelihood of ever being able to eat sushi again without twitching. The floors are dry and dusty, and the only light falls from holes in the ceiling as his footsteps thump and echo.

As Jack gets nearer to the empty "World of Coastal Life" exhibit that he landed in, a new memory, a sense of de ja vu, comes to him. _I heard footsteps when I was here_, he thinks, though some residual reality memories tell him he did not such thing. _They must have been me_.

He sees himself standing in the tank, and speeds towards himself, the sense of de ja vu increasing by the second. Even now, Jack can't help but be struck by how good-looking he is.

"Hey," his past self says sharply, and Jack feels the echoes of a new paradoxical memory rattle in his head. "You're going to cause a paradox, get out of it."

Before he – the older he – speaks Jack has no idea what he's going to say, but once he _has_, Jack had always known and the words sound distressingly familiar.

"That's what I'm _trying_ to do," he tells this earlier self, and each word becomes a memory, a false memory, a seed strewn backwards in time. "We're in a loop. Got to collapse it – " he breaks off, and a dogfish ghost swims lazily between them. There is a frisson as Jack catches the eye of his former self and remembers catching his future self's eye and seeing reflected in it himself catching the eye of –

\- he's on his back in short wet grass, grabbing for the sky, and he knows he's just died again, but he can't remember how or where he was when it happened. Only the blistering shock of everything starting up again.

"Okay," Owen says from somewhere up and to his left, "this is just creepy."

Jack sits up. Owen is standing with Tosh and a large red box that Jack recognises as a paradigm self-righter (and which he also very clearly remembers telling Tosh _not to use ever_), and Gwen has crouched to help him to his feet.

And around Jack's head a whole panoply of sea life in phantasm is circling like a halo.

"It's not _just_ creepy," Ianto corrects. He is carrying a shiny silver thermos. "It's also weird."

"Thanks for that blinding insight," Jack groans, getting to his feet. The Attenborough-load of ghosts comes with him. "What happened?"

Cautiously, trying to keep away from him, Tosh hands him the reader. Jack stares at the screen for a while before handing it back with a frown. "Well, that makes about much sense as Owen's taste in music."

"Oh that's right," Owen informs the sky above the, where clouds like sheep run together to form a flock of greying rain-threats, "insult me for _no reason_."

"Can – " Jack stars as a translucent octopus at knee-level snatches at a desperately-scuttling crab, " – can anyone else _see_ this?"

His team nod in silent unison and their faces all wear the same expression. Jack watches abstractedly the carnival of dead sea-things as it rotates around him. He feels like he's somehow in an invisible circular tank – at any rate, none of the ghosts stray more than three feet from him without vanishing.

"This is oddly unsettling," Jack admits.

Ianto passes him a thermos lid full of steaming coffee and Jack accepts it with gratitude in the depths of his bone marrow, if not exactly springing from his lips. He takes a sip and thinks, _I've lost a day or two somewhere_. Where he might have mislaid these hours he can't think, and after a while Jack just finishes the coffee and tries not to think about the creatures swimming about his body.

* * *

 

Jack's still in a thoughtful mood when he passes by the autopsy room later that day, but it doesn't preclude him eavesdropping on Ianto and Owen's conversation as they bag and label alien body parts for freezing and later study.

"You know what I miss?" Owen sighs. Jack can't see him but he's guessing he's making the Grumpy Frog Face.

"You've already said shitting, farting, sex, coffee, booze, pizza, other food, sleep, wanking, and pissing," Ianto says, a little testily. "Is there anything _left_ for you to miss?"

"I miss getting stoned," Owen mutters, apparently ignoring Ianto. There is a wet slap of alien meat hitting polished steel table.

"So do I, actually."

Owen snorts. "Sorry, Ianto mate, but I really don't see you as the type. You're too … proper."

"It used to be about the only thing I _did_ do," Ianto replies. He sounds calm, but Jack can detect an undercurrent of wryness.

"Oh come _on_."

"I wasn't _born_ wearing a suit and wielding a coffee machine, Owen." Rustling as a zip-lock bag is opened.

"You were a serious stoner?" Owen sounds like he still doesn't believe it. Frankly Jack wouldn't either had he not read Ianto's old Torchwood One personnel files and surveillance records.

"Not _that_ serious. But yes. I was part of the great brotherhood of the Playstation and White Lady." Ianto sounds a little terse now. Jack wonders if Owen's noticed this change in tone.

"Huh. No wonder you didn't get a degree – "

"- because I was _recruited_," Ianto says, and it's definitely a snap this time. He's also being economical with the truth, Jack knows. _Yes_, he was recruited by Torchwood One out of his BA (to what end Jack can only speculate) and so never completed it, but his marks had been appalling even then. There were reports from his tutors in his file, lamenting his lack of motivation. The words "drinking and rugby" cropped up with a sense of despair attached to them, time and again.

Jack wonders now – because two days of his very own live-action dead ghost undersea screensaver have left him fairly desperate to think of anything that isn't the cold shocks and moments of memory as starfish alight on and partially through his shoes – if there's ever a sense of wasted potential for Ianto. Jack wouldn't think that himself, because as a far as he's concerned there is no finer job than saving earth from alien invasion time and again, _even though_ he knows where it all ends up and what the end of the universe looks like. What he's doing here is _right_ and that's what matters.

"Why'd you _stop_, then?" Owen's voice drifts back over Jack's thoughts.

"Torchwood," Ianto says as though it's self-evident. "It's not like I really had any time for it after that." He might well have been talking about absolutely anything. Torchwood really didn't leave time for hobbies. Or drug habits.

"You're supposed to say you're high on life these days," Owen says with the level of disdain that only Owen is capable of achieving.

"I would've," Ianto says, and Jack can tell he's trying to stifle a smile, "but I sort of thought that'd be in poor taste."

But Ianto … as far as Jack can tell from what has become his bedtime reading (one unwanted side-effect of Jack's new built-in undersea adventure projection is that Ianto flatly refuses to fuck him – he claims the idea of all those dead fish watching him kills the mood. Jack has tried to coax him into it with the sensible reminder that the animals can't really _see_ him, but Ianto stands firm: no hide-the-sausage until the piscine angelic audience is gone) … he's spent his whole life either hiding his light under a bushel or refusing to acknowledge that it even exists.

Only the advent of an intense and doomed relationship seemed to have brought out the efficiency that Jack knows, takes for granted, and – if he's honest – relies upon heavily.

"- may be _dead_, but that is still fucking disgusting," Owen's voice breaks through his reverie once more and Jack hears the change in breathing that's Ianto's version of a chuckle. "You _have_ to have been taking lessons from Tosh in how to make people wish they could still throw up, that's – "

"No, from Jack," Ianto says, and Jack can tell he's smiling. He's distracted from the rest of the conversation by a sea urchin, which, pushed by an inquisitive sea lion, rolls into his stomach cavity and sits there like a snowball until he moves away. The cold lingers, and for the rest of the day he can't quite shake the urge to withdraw his tendrils inside his hard outer shell whenever something unexpected happens.

* * *

 

"Any luck?" Jask asks. Tosh leans away as a shark twists and swishes past her, vanishing into nothingness as soon as it gets far enough away from Jack.

"Not so far, no. I don't _think_ it's a mental projection, just a temporal one that's become anchored to your unusually high artron energy." She nervously fondles her coffee cup and adds, "Jack, could you … _please_ … stand further away. I really don't like sharks and … squirmy things."

"But corpses are fine?" Jack backs off anyway, taking his musée-de-mer with him, until Tosh is out of fish range. "Actually, forget I said that. And don't tell Owen I said it, either."

Tosh types something and says pensively, "Corpses are fine as long as there isn't anything … you know. _Wiggly_ in them."

"And we're back to Owen again." Jack's view of Tosh is slightly obscured as a lobster – translucent and grey – crawls down his face like a cold shower, whiskers waving in some out-of-time-and-space undersea breeze.

"The problem is I have no idea how to detach it from you or collapse it," Tosh says, still peering at the screen. "It definitely generated itself in that field alongside the aquarium, but I can't figure out … how it's anchoring itself." She chews on a strand of her hand. It's a new habit, though Jack can't pinpoint precisely when she started doing it. "It's a temporal light distortion," she repeats, mostly to herself.

"Do you think dying would disrupt the link?" Jack asks as a parrotfish trundles through his shoulder, spilling glittering fragments of ground-up coral from its beak. The beautiful colours of the fish are a faded photograph of themselves, and as the coral-chomping pisces swims through him Jack feels a short burst of unexpected melancholy.

"Jack," Gwen says from behind him, "you _know_ you can't solve every problem by just shooting someone."

"I was gonna hang myself," Jack lies, turning to wink at her. "Nice way to die. I guess I don't need to tell you about the super-intense orgasm, right?"

"You know your, um," Tosh says, "your, your _fish display_ registers as having a _negative_ artron index?"

Jack's still grinning at Gwen, so he gets to see the look of "what the hell is she talking about" that crosses her face at this. He's still smiling as he turns back to Tosh.

"That's … weird."

"It _might_ explain why it was drawn to you," Tosh points out. "Given that you're pretty much the largest concentration of positively charged artron for miles."

Jack concedes that this is probably the case. He's still trying to think of an intelligent answer when Ianto passes through from the autopsy room. His front, hands, and face are spattered heavily with a thick, blue-black goo, and judging from his haste and direction he's going straight to wash as much of it off as he can.

Ianto catches them looking at him askance, and says in a surprisingly irritated tone, "Did any of _you_ know that Quellquastians have an _ink sac_?"

Jack grins. "Oh, that's not an ink sac."

"It's not?" Ianto doesn't look convinced, but he _does_ look worried. "You have an eel … in your armpit … it's quite hard to take you seriously."

"I know I have," Jack says. The chill and thoughts of whitebait have clued him in on that. "But like I said, it's not an ink sac. It's … well."

"What?"

"The Quellquastian equivalent of a testicle," Jack grins. And oh, the look on Ianto's face defies description, but it's absolutely priceless. Jack's kinda glad Gwen and Tosh are laughing too; it makes him feel like less of a bastard for finding Ianto's evident discomfort and revulsion so funny. It's Ianto's own fault for looking so hilarious and … well, cute … in his distress over being covered in alien jizz.

Ianto's face fades from the incomparable look of visceral disgust to one of exasperation. "I can't believe I'm being mocked by a man with a crab on his shoulder," he says, taking his leave.

Tosh and Gwen look at Jack, who does indeed have a crab balancing precariously on his shoulder. All three of them splutter into uncontrollable giggles again.

* * *

 

Two days later, when Jack's rotating fish halo has so confused an errant Invar scout that it stands still and waits for them to capture it instead of putting up a fight as the Invar usually do, he finds a pinkly-scrubbed Ianto and a coffee-holding Tosh peering intently at a screen in the Hub.

"I told you, no Match dot com when you're on duty," he says by way of a hello. They don't turn around. Jack feels a little slighted, but he also feels an intense craving for kelp that rather overwhelms it, followed by a sense of low-tide. "What's – "

"Neutralising the projection's artron index," Tosh says absently. Jack edges round behind her so that he can see the screen, but it doesn't do him much good as he can't really understand what's up there, and going by his frown neither can Ianto. "All you … hmm. We can probably reset the … Singularity Scalpel … and aim a stream of positively charged artron energy at it – "

"What - _hey_." Jack gives her a worried look, and he can see Ianto freeze. The Singularity Scalpel is friend to no one. They can barely get it to do what Owen wants it to do (which is currently to destroy bullets inside alien corpses so he doesn't snap any _actual_ scalpel blades on them), and terrifying genius though Toshiko Sato may be, Jack's not thoroughly certain that any experiments with artron manipulation won't just end in something important getting blown-up. Like his _liver_.

"Are you sure," Ianto says carefully, examining the screen, "that it'll neutralize the, uh, the ghost fish and not just kill Jack?"

Tosh shrugs. Jack is a little offended that his death is such a minor concern to the team these days, and says so.

"A few days ago you were considering shooting yourself," Tosh points out, and adds to his startled expression, "is it really that different?"

Ianto mutters, "What matters to Jack is who's got their finger on the trigger," and when Tosh looks hurt he adds, "he's a control freak," in an even lower voice, which Jack can unfortunately still hear. He thinks this is possibly the most hypocritical collection of words he has ever heard anyone utter in his entire _very long_ life.

"He can't use the Singularity Scalpel on _himself_," Tosh says with another charming frown. "It doesn't work like that." She keeps her eyes on the screen, and Jack gets the impression she's trying very hard to ignore the possibility of a spectral cuttlefish or the like passing through her at any moment.

"I'm still _here_," Jack points out.

"Owen has the most experience with it," Ianto points out as though Jack hasn't spoken. He has his hands on his hips, and Jack thinks how much he likes the way that pulls Ianto's shirt tight across his chest, and he's hit by a tidal wave of unexpected longing – it's been _several days_ since the damn stupid conversation and he hasn't laid hand or other body part on Ianto once since. He hasn't _laid_, full stop.

And it's not the sex. Well, it's not _just_ the sex. He misses the smell of Ianto's skin, the warmth of it (which covert shirt-sniffing _can't_ replicate), the texture of his short fluffy hair under Jack's fingertips, and he misses feeling that he has the right to just go over and _touch_ whenever the urge arises.

Also, he's kinda backed up, because somehow masturbating in the company of ghostly prawns fails to get him off.

"Owen also has a great record in blowing stuff up with it because he forgot to check the settings," Jack amends, "I don't want mass quantities of artron energy polluting Cardiff if I can help it." He shivers reflexively as a sole wafts through his. "I'd prefer a more precise hand."

Tosh and Ianto exchange a wordless glance, and Ianto says, mostly to her, "Shouldn't. I don't know how to get a focus on it."

Tosh shrugs. "Alright. I'll see if I can wrestle it away from Owen." And she's gone.

"This has to be one of the weirder weeks I've had," Ianto says as she leaves.

"It's not been great."

Ianto gives him what looks like a deeply sardonic grin. "Want me to hold your hand while Tosh does the honours?"

"Ha. Ha." Jack stretches, feeling his back pop. "I'll have you know my pain threshold is second only to Owen's." He tries to avoid thinking about how it got that way. "… but yeah, actually. I _do_."

Ianto's smile grows less sarcastic. "Whatever you say, sir."

"It's just a word," Jack says, feeling that now is an entirely poor time to bring the topic up but apparently unable to stop himself.

"So are all words," Ianto says somewhat philosophically. "That doesn't mean I have to like them."

"Fine, what am I supposed to call you, then?"

Ianto's smile is painfully sarcastic. "Well, there's a _name_ on my birth certificate that everyone else seems capable of _using_ even if they can't all spell it."

Jack grabs his hand and yanks on it. "And that's all? I have to refer to you as my 'Ianto'?"

Ianto seems surprisingly pleased by this. "If I _am_, then yes."

"Are what?"

"Yours."

"_Are_ you?" Jack squeezes Ianto's hand perhaps a little tighter than he needs to.

Ianto rolls his eyes and tries to flex his crushed fingers. "What do _you_ think?" He seems unfazed, now, by the presence of a largeish shark-ghost, which is more than can be said for the other fish-ghosts, as they scatter like raindrops hitting marble.

"What do _I_ think?" Jack grins. "I think I can't wait to get rid of these fucking fish and get _you_ out of that suit."

"There you go," Ianto says, and now his smile is one of those private ones, the cat-like, half-drawn smile. "I don't _do_ that for anyone else. That's how you know."

Jack notes the reproach, the implication, but before he's really had the chance to feel guilty, Tosh returns, bearing the Singularity Scalpel.


End file.
